Guiding private sector partnership development that improves landscape performance
Conventional agricultural expansion is a culprit in land degradation, overexploitation of natural resources and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as negative socioeconomic impacts on smallholder farmers and their communities. Markets too often fail to reward farmers, livestock keepers and land managers for choosing practices that protect the biodiversity and ecosystem services needed to sustain agricultural productivity over the long term.
Meanwhile, business involvement in landscape approaches remains low; fewer than 1 in 4 integrated landscape initiatives worldwide have active private sector partners. Without these important players at the table, many of these sustainable land and resource management initiatives struggle to create or gain access to market opportunities to reward good practice.
We have lead a global initiative to shift food and agriculture business sustainability activities into sustainable landscape action. By connecting business leaders with government and civil society champions of landscape approaches, and providing them with research-backed decision-making tools, we are transforming the way multinational companies think about and engage with their suppliers and, crucially, other sector stakeholders in the landscapes they source from. Find out more.
The Global Agri-business Alliance (GAA) and EcoAgriculture Partners are working together to identify and learn from a selection of innovative regenerative and restorative landscape partnerships in which agri-business companies are actively involved. These case studies will support us in our shared ambition to better understand the agri-business perspective—their business rationale for landscape partnerships, institutional models, business and landscape benefits, and how to bring success to scale.
EcoAgriculture Partners works with integrated landscape initiatives to build sustainable, equitable, and valuable partnerships with businesses, from small to multinational, at work in their landscapes. We provide strategy analysis for the design and implementation of public-private landscape investment plans and we help landscape initiatives develop entrepreneurial leadership to capture value from improved landscape performance.
We teach business leaders and companies how and why to participate productively in integrated landscape initiatives, by creating and testing training materials, running courses, and participating in business roundtables and outreach events. We build capacity for multi-stakeholder facilitation and offer governance structure advisory services. Finally, we help develop innovative market and finance-based mechanisms to support integrated landscape management in commodity landscapes.
We lead businesses and investors to the right kind of partnerships with initiatives who are using landscape-scale, stakeholder-inclusive management to reduce environmental and social risks to farmers and the private sector. We’re working with TerrAfrica to train African business leaders to recognize and engage in partnerships with landscape initiatives that are good for people, planet, and profit.
We develop and test new tools and strategies together with local landscape initiatives. In Mbeya, Tanzania we worked with landscape leaders to explore the opportunity and challenges of, and ultimately to create, a “Landscape Label” that could be applied to a variety of products produced using sustainable practices that are part of the landscape management plan.
We evaluate the performance of market mechanisms designed to support sustainable agriculture. We show where, when and why voluntary standards and eco-certifications deliver the biodiversity benefits they promise. We demonstrate if and how much smallholder farmers benefit from compliance with these standards.
The IDH – Sustainable Trade Initiatives’ Initiative for Sustainable Landscapes (ISLA) counted on us to develop the guidance document for their program managers in the first six business-focused landscape initiatives they enrolled in Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya and Ethiopia.
TerrAfrica is using our materials to train extension agents in business engagement within multi-stakeholder partnerships in 24 countries throughout Africa. Read them and feel free to use them.
In Kijabe, Kenya, smallholder farmers are marketing products using the Kijabe landscape label, and selling honey, eggs, and saplings at a premium in local markets.
Through these seven two-page case studies prepared for the Global Agri-business Alliance, we illuminate examples of agri-businesses that have looked beyond their farm gates to opportunities for engagement in the landscapes surrounding their operations, and found fertile ground for cooperation.
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Looking for help finding funding for your landscape action plan? Get a Lift.
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Together with IDH, the Sustainable Trade Initiative, we present a “How to… guide” for promoting effective coordinated private, public and civic sector investments in sustainable natural resources management.
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